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• Sun Apr 20 2025

Oldest serving US astronaut returns to Earth on 70th birthday

Don Pettit has now spent a total of 590 days in space during his four missions

America's oldest serving astronaut Dan Pettit has returned to Earth on his 70th birthday.

The Soyuz MS-26 space capsule carrying Pettit and his Russian crewmates Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner made a parachute-assisted landing in Kazakhstan's steppe at 06:20 local time (01:20 GMT) on Sunday.

They spent 220 days on board the International Space Station (ISS), orbiting the Earth 3,520 times, the US space agency Nasa said.

For Pettit - who has now spent a total of 590 days in space - it was his fourth mission.

Still, he is not the oldest person to fly in orbit - that record belongs to John Glenn, who aged 77 flew on a Nasa mission in 1998. He died in 2016.